Konrad Werner: Only the corrupt separate sport and politics

Euro 2012

In school I hated PE (Physical Education in England). We needn't go into details, but basically sports classes were, for my flailing, undeveloped being, a particularly cruel type of psychological torture. And it didn't end in school. Werner summer holidays were spent being forced to compete against a sleek and supple elder German cousin in various physical trials. This left my already harrowed soul begging for release, mainly in the form of commentaries on J. R. R. Tolkien.

But now I love sport. I mean watching it. I can't wait for Euro 2012 and the Olympics. I'm no brainy pundit – I mainly treat watching sport on TV as a mental laxative – but few things in life give me more pleasure than the glorious triviality of a major international tournament in which nations compete to see who is the best.

But even I, with my physical ineptitude, my lack of knowledge and my essential emotional indifference, can see that sport is more than a game. People invest so much national pride and emotion in sport, so it's natural that their leaders invest a political stake in it.

The old George Orwell quote, which he wrote in 1945 on the occasion of the Moscow Dynamo football team's ill-tempered tour of Britain, bears repeating: "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play; it is bound up with hatred and jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all the rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words it is war minus the shooting.'' That's why we love it so much. To deny that sport is closely bound up with so many other, bigger, deeper, more primal and more political feelings is to deny the whole point of it.

In fact, there's no clearer stink of corruption than when a politician says that sport and politics need to be separated. In the last couple of days, that's a line we've heard from people like Vladimir Putin, Sepp Blatter, and, yes, the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose Foreign Ministry said it considered the "politicisation of sporting events to be destructive." Destructive of its right to lock up opposition leaders. "Separating sport and politics" is a euphemism for "crushing civil freedoms," and we'll hear it a lot again when the Olympics come around and various protests are quietly shut down in London. In fact, it says everything you need to know that the IOC has taken this division as its basic motto, because the Olympics is, at its heart, a giant fascist ritual designed to legitimise totalitarian regimes – from Hitler's Berlin to Soviet Moscow to Wen Jiabao's Beijing.

Indeed, the man who made the IOC what it is today was a politician – Juan Antonio Samaranch was head of the IOC from 1980 to 2001, and, in his previous job, sports minister in Franco's fascist Spain. Just sayin'.

Angela Merkel, characteristically hedging her bets, said she would decide "at short notice" whether she would go or not. This is because Merkel is like me: she really loves watching football despite being uniquely physically awkward. So it's kind of unfortunate that all of Germany's group games are too played in Ukraine. But that's okay, Angie, you can always come over to my house and watch it on the telly.

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Comments (2)

Other quote

I saw Fire in Babylon. Really loved it. Here's my other favourite quote from that Orwell essay, which basically argues that the modern obsession with sport came out of the rise of nationalism in the 20th century: "If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators."

Benjamin Knightmore than 3 years ago

Spot on Konrad

Watch "Fire in Babylon", "The 16th man" or even "One night in turin". Tommy Smith and John Carlos on the podium, Cathy Smith winning medals. Sport is politics. Full stop. Unfortunately sports governing bodies have always been corrupt bodies who claim they are outside of politics, meanwhile they impose laws on independent states on the one hand whist supporting dictators on the other. Sepp Blatter will always be a crook, and if you think that Samaranch was bad then check out Avery Brundage. As an aside, you know that UEFA fined man city more for appearing on the pitch a minute late than they did Porto for their fans monkey chants.